Interracial Groups Research Articles

Fantasy in Interracial Groups

BEHAVIORAL SCIENTISTS have acquired an expanding knowledge and appreciation of the significance of projection, not only as an individual mechanism for dealing with potentially troublesome unconscious wishes and emotions, but also as a socially shared group process (Horwitz and Cartwright, 1963; Henry and Guetzkow, 1951). Fantasy is an important dimension in the life of a group in that it provides members with an opportunity to communicate about latent emotional problems confronted in the group without making them explicit, and therefore, potentially disruptive (Mills, 1964a; Slater, 1961; 1966). By displacing feelings and wishes generated in the group on characters and situations depicted in stories, participants may reveal sentiments normally suppressed and hidden from view. The analysis of fantasy material would therefore seem to be particularly valuable in approaching the emotional dynamics of interracial groups, not only because it gives the researcher access to information usually denied him through other methods of inquiry, but also because it gives the group member an opportunity to reveal sentiments that he may ordinarily feel socially inappropriate. In interracial groups of fairly extensive and intimate contact, blacks and whites, perhaps for the first time, encounter a situation that is not easily grasped in terms of their pre-existing cultural models of the interpersonal world. How do they go about making emotional sense out of this situation and their relations to other people in it? Are there any observable regularities in the emotional mechanisms that come to play in the interpersonal relations in groups of a particular racial and sexual composition? This research attempts in a preliminary way to answer these

Studies on South African Bantu and Caucasian pre-school children Mortality rates in urban and rural areas

Investigations are being undertaken on interracial groups of pre-school children in South Africa to investigate the bearing of socio-economic, rural, urban, and other factors on the health pattern. To throw light on the subject, mortality rates of children under 5 were studied among different groups of Bantu and Caucasians. As expected, a rise in socio-economic status in the Bantu was associated with a fall in child mortality. The relatively small difference between Bantu rural and urban toddler mortality rates was disappointing, as it occurred in spite of the far better public health facilities in the urban centres. The mortality differential between Bantu and Caucasian children aged 1–4 is believed, as by other workers, to be a far more sensitive index of the public health situation than that of infant mortality; the rate at age 1–2 may even more closely portray the public health state. It is concluded that the benefits accruing from enlightened health education and modern hygienic practices will not be fully manifest until there is an improvement in the nutrition of this toddler group, and in the adverse effects of poverty, ignorance and disease.